


One Second

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Flash Fic, Gen, One Second, Prompt: What can happen in a second, Werewolf Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 19:47:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7727524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything in Stiles's life, everything of importance, happened in the span of a second.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Second

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of a prompt from the Beta Branch -- What could happen in a second?

Stiles had always wondered how things happened so quickly, how the world fell apart in a series of minutes, hours, days. He never considered what could happen in the breadth of a second. 

One Mississippi. 

One one thousand.

One chimpanzee. 

When he was younger, his mother used to tell him to think about every action for ten seconds. She said that he was a spontaneous child, that he got an idea and he ran with it. There were some things though, things that he did, that he thought better of later. Things like dying his hair orange and riding his mattress down the stairs, things like feeding his Adderall to his goldfish. She told him that if he thought about something for ten seconds and it was still a good idea, that he would end up with fewer moments where he regretted his actions. 

She knew he couldn’t wait more than ten seconds, and he had agreed, because what could really happen in ten seconds? 

What could happen in one second? 

One alligator. Two alligator. Three alligator. Four. 

Five elephant. Six elephant. Seven elephant. More. 

Nine battleship. Ten battle ship. Ten, ten battleships, and if it was a good idea, he could carry it out. What could change in ten seconds? The better question was what could change in one? 

Stiles should have known the weight of a second by now. How many things in his life had changed in ten seconds? His mother’s heart had stopped in the space between two seconds. He’d watched his father get shot for the first time in the course of a fraction of a second. 

Some of the things that happened in a second were permanent, some of them weren’t. His mother’s heart never started again. His father lived to get shot at another day. He should have known that his life would come down to the importance of individual seconds. The importance of seconds never stood out as much as they should have. 

Until that moment, that moment in the woods, with his heart racing so fast that he was worried it’d beat out of his chest, his feet eating up ground as he ran, trying to keep him limbs from failing him. 

In a second, his foot caught on a root and he fell. It was the first important second since his mother had died. 

The next few came in quick succession. 

A hand gripped him hard on the shoulder, pulled him to his feet, and slammed him into a tree. 

Teeth closed around his shoulder, ripping deep and taking flesh with them when they tore away. 

That was it. The most important second of his life, right there, and it was so bracketed by other important moments that it wasn’t until later that he realized how very life altering it was. It wasn’t until he was standing in front of his bathroom mirror, running a finger over unblemished skin, that he knew the weight of it. 

Later, when he tried to explain to Lydia why he was struggling with his school work, he would try to explain the importance of that second. Once, when Scott had asked him what had gone so wrong as to change him, he tried. In the hospital, as his father looked up from a bed after another heart attack, his third since being told what went bump in the night, the words were on his tongue. Each time, his voice would seize, his shoulder would throb, and the seconds would trip by. Nothing would happen in those seconds, they would be as empty and uneventful than any other in his life. 

He knew the importance of a second, now. He knew they were either full of nothing or full of everything. 

In one second his mother died. 

In one second his father asked him to leave. 

In one second his best friend denounced him. 

In one second…well, Stiles was tired of losing things in seconds. He supposed, as he stared in the mirror, his eyes shining gold, that it was past time for a second to give him something.


End file.
